The Art of Herding
by Cadavatar
Summary: In her youth, Lace Harding had decided she liked sheep more than she liked people. People needed help. Sheep could, for the most part, help themselves.


Scout Harding decided a long time ago she loved sheep more than she loved people.

That wasn't to say she didn't love people of course. She was fond of the Inquisitor, of Josephine, of Dorian, of Leliana when she wasn't concerned about getting killed by her. Individually, she was fond of people. It showed from how positive she was, outgoing and kind. But despite her extroverted tendencies, she could _read_ people. For the most part, she was unimpressed, despite herself.

Sheep, she had determined at a young age, were always sheep. They were predictable to a fault, from ewes to lambs and everything between. Those who never handled them thought the rams were mean, nasty creatures. But aside from a couple well placed, well deserved headbutts that bruised her and knocked the wind from her lungs, they were tolerable. She had gotten worse wounds from men in Redcliffe that couldn't take no for an answer when she visited the tavern for a drink after a hard day- and her Mabari, Maker bless Contessa, was just as content to put both kinds of males in their place.

In the summers, sometimes she would pack a small tent, so the sheep could graze further away and she wouldn't be troubled with the task of rounding them back up and returning them home. Up by lake Luthias, overlooking the road, she could spend her days chewing on stalks of blood lotus on the sly- nobody would ever know about the strange hallucinations she had up by those waterfalls, giggling to herself as she admired the shapes in the clouds. She was young. Everyone was young, once. To her credit, the sheep liked to eat the lotus plants too, and all they did afterward was fall over.

For a long time, that was all she wanted, was to be left alone by the lakebed with her neighbor's sheep.

Her mother worried about her when she was younger, as was her way. She still worried now, just at a distance. A woman that was such a homebody really had nothing else to waste her energy on, to be fair. With a fond smile, Lace would recall how her mother scrubbed the sheep smell away well into her teenage years when there was even a glimmer of possibility that someone would stop by to visit. A woman of many words, she complimented Lace well, as in her early stages of adulthood, she was not nearly as articulate unless pressed.

That changed at some point, and Lace didn't realize it until she was standing in the middle of her neighbors one day, mediating an argument between where their Druffalo were and were not allowed to graze. Her younger self wondered why she cared, and her older self knew the answer, even as she told both men to shut their mouths and where on their anatomy their respective Druffalo could graze, or, if they preferred, they could work out a better solution. In the end, it was simple. People needed help- sheep could, for the most part, help themselves.

That was how she came to the Inquisition, after all. They needed help. She remembered it with clarity- how earlier that fateful day her mother had commented about the chill starting to catch in the air in the early daylight. Soon they'd have to be up before dawn, using shovels to crack the ice off the top of the herd's water troughs. Contessa had been chasing Fennecs all morning, and had caught two of them in a rare display of agility. One had lived, and she made the Mabari let it go. The other she had tacked to a fencepost, to pick up when she herded the sheep back home. They could skin it and dry the meat for jerky later.

The man she had saved, Sleiter- had he lived to see Skyhold, she would have thanked him for his unwitting stumble into those bandits. Unfortunately, for all the luck he'd gained in her saving him, it caught up later when he died at Haven. But she remembered him, said hello when she could, and wondered now where she would be had he not stumbled across her, in all his flailing, fighting off bandits on the dirt path she took to her grazing field. All she did was fling some stones and let Contessa work off the last of her energy doing the heavy lifting. After that, things fell into place.

Sometimes, when she looks out over the Exalted Plains, it reminds her of the Hinterlands, vaguely. She recalls how she went home that day after marking the scouts' maps, telling her mother about the incident, and listened to her worry- not over her, but over 'those poor boys, with only a simple map to help them out'. It was doubtful she was trying to guide her toward the Inquisition- after all, when she came home later and told her mother she was going, the older woman had wept for a solid hour- but it resonated with Lace. That night, she had tossed and turned, worried that the scouts would get ambushed in the night, or worse, the next morning. When the sun broke its first rays across the sky, she was already up, polishing her father's bow and stringing it.

"Hunting today?" Her mother had asked as she whipped up a quick breakfast for her, eggs and a small helping of the Fennec meat from the day before.

"No, not today." Lace explained. "I'm going back to help that scouting outfit. They probably don't know all the nooks and crannies around here yet."

There had been no argument, no fuss. And as the dawn broke over the walls, with Scout Harding on the battlments, chewing the carefully wrapped Fennec Jerky her mother had sent, the first rays of sun on her face reminded her of the sun in her eyes that morning when she had strolled up to the Inquisition's camp, minus one Mabari and a flock of sheep, with a faint smile on her face.

What she had said was: "Maps are all right, but nothing beats a guide." What she had meant, however, was that she had decided she would rather try her hand at herding people than sheep.

After all, people needed help. In the end, sheep could help themselves.

Maybe in the end she decided that, by a slim margin, she liked people just a little more than sheep.


End file.
